I was recently asked if I could come up with a scenario where metadata would be better than folders.

Here goes!

Imagine I have scans of receipts as PDFs, and I want to store them per vendor, per department and per year.
I could create a document library. At the root let’s put one folder for each vendor. Inside those, a folder for each department. Inside those, one folder per year.
My users can upload their receipts into the correct year folder, using the browser; Windows Explorer; OneDrive Sync – or Outlook plugins like OnePlace, Harmonie, Repstor etc.

Users can now view all the receipts for a particular vendor, and drill in to get the detail.

But, if a user wants a view of these receipts by department or by year,
we would have to entirely restructure the document library – and move files around in bulk.

Alternatively, we could use metadata.
Let’s create a Content Type for Scanned Receipts that has Site Columns for Department, Vendor and Year.

Just by doing that, users can have views showing: receipts per department, receipts per year, receipts per vendor and any combination of these.

Joel is a full-stack cloud architect who codes. He is a Microsoft Certified SharePoint 2016, SharePoint Online and Azure specialist and Microsoft Certified Trainer.
He has over 17 years' experience with SharePoint and the Microsoft .NET Framework.
He's also Director at Microsoft Gold Partner JFDI Consulting Ltd. Read More…